The park at Versailles is being massacred

Two years ago, the Work issued a cry of alarm: "Let's save the splendors of Versailles from time and architects!"
Since then, Mr. Rockefeller's nine million have come, as well as the few hundred thousand francs, the product of last year's festivities. That's enough to repair the ravages of time. The architects remained...
Go and see, to the left of the Tapis Vert, the colonnade of Mansard. A team of workers has been employed there for a few days. What to do? To cut down the trees, not the modest "saplings", but the largest and most beautiful.
Go and see. It's a disaster. Six out of ten trees are down, Only thin trunks remain standing, delivering to the whim the Amazon of Buiret, or the Achilles of Vigier. And yesterday morning, it continued. The lumberjacks remained alert, ready to cut down anything that was wanted. Did not Mr. Chaussemiche have three million to spend on "pruning" work?

We remember the various projects that this singular chief architect of the Palace threatened to carry out one after the other: reconstruction of the Louis XIII wing in "modern Louis XIV" style, transformation of the Pompadour menagerie into a dance hall, development of a railway station near the Suisses pond. It was always possible, fortunately, to stop in time the damage conceived by this official vandal. This time, the said Mr. Chaussemiche simply imagined restoring the gardens to the state they were in at the time of Le Nôtre; and he had ordered axes.

These works, he declared yesterday, would have been completed long ago if the necessary funds had been available. Fortunately, the alarm was given. Where would Mr. Chaussemiche's devastating zeal have stopped? Mr. Paul Léon, director of Fine Arts, has sent the order to immediately interrupt the work in question and a delegation from the commission of historical monuments, urgently convened, will go to Versailles. There is no doubt that Mr. Pératé will be definitively edified, if he is not already, on the type of activity of his chief architect.